Life of Riley
by Nabob
Summary: The life of Riley is something he lives only through memory. [ONE-SHOT]


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**Life of Riley**

_-- An easy and pleasant life._

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The sun sits high and burns into his back, the sweltering heat of noon rolling sweat beads down his face. His feet are hot and sticky in his shoes, and he wishes he had worn sandals instead.

Steps that lead high smolder beneath each foot that falls hard upon them, the balls of his feet hitting solid stone that does not sympathize with sore extremities. A steady throb that had already worked its way into his soles is now sizzling as they are baked inside his sneakers. His socks are wet-hot with sweat.

Beneath the _torii_ he stops, his hand wiping perspiration from his brow and running back through short hair.

It is so _hot_. Sweltering and humid, and stinking of city waste and cars.

He lifts the bag that he let slump beside him when he stopped. It is time to move forward again.

He does not find her in the house, but in the garden, kneeling over her flowers, a dirtied spade in one gloved hand. She looks pretty, he thinks, and smiles as he does so; a simple kerchief keeping her black-streaked-grey hair out of her face, save for a silver strand that falls and curls near the crow's feet that crinkle her eyes. She is now smiling too.

_Tadaima_, he says, and she hurries to get to her feet, scrambling to take off her smudged gloves, but he envelops her in a hug before she can.

Later they are sitting in the kitchen, electric fan blowing warm air from the counter because she cannot afford air conditioning. _So expensive_, she says, and pours him a glass of soda pop, ice tinkling as she sets it down before him.

It is cold and streaming down his throat – he is too thirsty to be polite. Besides, this is _home_.

They talk of nothing-things, words rolling down the hands that pass the seconds, until it is five o'clock and she insists she must make him dinner. He does not offer to help; she wants to do this herself.

But he is at home and wanders up the padded stairs – these soft beneath his sock-covered feet – with his suitcase in hand. _So nice_, he thinks, letting the house sink back into him, remembering him. A stain on the carpet there, he notices – remembers – where he'd spilt juice and out of childish fear said nothing until it was too late, when the carpet had already drunk it dry.

And there, a chip off the railing, the result of a too-late sleep-in on a school day and a too-fast-rush down the stairs; and the lamp, whose cord had tripped and followed him down them.

And here, _here_ in his room, same-old same-old room with the Pokemon bedspread that was never gotten rid of, and the action figures on the shelves and the posters on the wall, and the hidden porn magazines beneath his bed. A silly grin grows on his lips – beneath his sheets lies a memory of sixteen, of eager uncertainty that coiled itself between the sweaty blankets, underneath the Pokemon bedspread.

Still smiling and still the same as if twenty-five years ago was only yesterday, she is framed by simple wood, arm looped around gap-toothed nine-year-old him. He reaches to pick up the memory, his fingers remembering the feel of her T-shirt through the glassy cover, his eyes remembering her smile, his ears remembering her laugh, his nose remembering her light perspiration that mingled with deodorant, and his tongue remembering the sweet pocky that her hands had slipped secretly into his when Mama wasn't watching.

He remembers, and through his remembering and through the glass beneath the wooden frame she lives again, still somewhere and still _someone_, not just _kanji_ on a gravestone that marks no grave, no body, no ashes. Just a someone that was somewhere at a sometime but no more; and only through the recollections do the sounds bring forth a person and not just a _name_ – a combination of meanings imbedded into noise that here is language and word.

But do the sounds remember the person – do they remember her body, or her smile? Do they recall her voice, or how it sounded when she sang – even if it was not good-good but only good? Can they feel her hands, like he felt them when she smoothed away the tears that bled from deep inside, like the disease that had bled inside Otou-san and ate away his hair and being?

Do they remember?

Will her name be not just a name but _her_? Carried on through this and that of so many years ago that still come and go inside his head? Will her name pass through lips that remember her just like he does?

But her name is just her name, three syllables that are not big enough to remember her and remember just _how much_ she was, and how big inside she grew and spread beyond the little soundings of her name, too much to be contained in just three sounds.

Inside the picture she is forever tucked away, like a book upon a shelf, covered in dust that marks its unused and forgotten state. The book has an ending but the story itself is incomplete, all the might-have-beens lacking in ink and paper, so that only his thoughts may write them now.

He sits slowly, his weight sinking into the soft mattress that is now too small for him. He thinks of the old lady downstairs, of her bony hands that still chop and grate and stir as they did over twenty years ago. He sees her in his mind's eyes, sweeping, cleaning, gathering up the sheets of their unused beds and washing them, drying them, and later smoothing them over the frames of mattresses that could now only fit the grandchildren she's never had.

The memory finds its place on his bedside table again, the sound of laughter and the feel of cotton slowly fading away, until he is left in silence with only his nostalgia for company.

On the surface it's so easy to be carefree, he knows, but somewhere beneath all the smiles and the politeness and the comfort, they hide the tears and the shame and the disquiet that he once thought would fade like his bruises from boyhood.

Ah, yes, boyhood, he thinks. A time in his life that was perhaps not as long ago as he thinks; when he had such aspiring hopes of playing soccer and becoming rich and famous… At eight it had seemed so easy to think that things would never change, that everything would come as easily as his young mind thought everything did. At eight he knew nothing of bills or rent or tuition or unemployment – any of those things he would have brushed off easily.

But now he finds himself older and living and not playing soccer, and the eight-year-old's daydream of fame and fortune is just another turned page in his own book.

It was _supposed_ to be a life, not necessarily of ease, but at least of contentment, which he has for the longest while found himself lacking. It's unfortunate for the both of them, he thinks, both he and the woman downstairs. At one point in their lives they almost had everything, and now they have only each other and the dusty books that line their shelves.

Stepping outside his room he stops, his suitcase in his hand again. He stares at the closed door next to the open one at his back, and for a moment he almost thinks he hears her.

But the moment is gone, and he quickly walks away into Jii-chan's room – or the guest room; he can't remember. He sets his bag down on the end of the well-made bed, everything in the room dusted and clean like all the others in the house. And yet it is still exactly the same, another finished chapter of the story their lives have written together.

Jii-chan's clothes are still in the closet, and he doesn't mind.

When dinner calls him back to the kitchen again, he finds the table set and the food looking and smelling delicious. He smiles at her, and that's all she needs.

They are both silent, having known the other for so long that all the words that have needed saying have been said, and to speak at all now would only be a waste to the silence that has been such comfort to them both for all the long years in between then and now.

When he steps out of the doorway, the air is cool, and the sweltering heat has disappeared with the sun behind the skyscrapers, a soft glow warming the visible sky.

His feet carry him away from the house and through the grounds that are as well-kept as when he was a young boy. And yet…he worries. The woman inside the house is old and still growing older, and he knows that the men's salaries have already unplugged her savings, which are beginning to drain.

Ah, but such an easy life, it could have been, he muses; such a simple life with simple pleasures, it could have been.

One day, he knows he will return here and remain until he is as old and gray as Jii-chan ever was. One day, he will come here and it will once again be _home_.

But such thoughts must wait until later, he thinks – yes, later.

A flock of birds catches his attention and he leans back to see them flying overhead. He turns around to watch them fly off into the distance, black silhouettes against the sinking sun.

If he listens closely he can hear them singing.


End file.
